Käthe Kollwitz: On the Death of the Great German Graphic Artist*

Paul Westheim

In early October, Käthe Kollwitz1 died in a small Harz village at the age of seventy-eight. She was a great artist and, what is even more exceptional, a great human being: a woman who had stood on the side of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised for her entire life, a comrade who consciously and determinedly used her talent in the service of the struggle against social and political injustice.

She was born in East Prussia. Her grandfather Rupp was a pastor, as was her father, Schmidt. Her father was a man of strong ethics, filled with a deep inner faith, and the Prussian state church, which served the state more than it served God, no longer satisfied him. He renounced his function and income and placed himself at the forefront of the Free Church movement. This strong sense of ethics, one could almost say this innate Protestantism, was instilled in the blood of his daughter, who combated social injustice in the late nineteenth century.

She married Dr. Kollwitz, a doctor for the poor in Berlin whose consultations were always crowded with the doubly afflicted: poor people who were also sick. What she saw and witnessed there became the content of her oeuvre, which in addition to her social awareness also conveyed a plea, an ardent plea to society to put an end to the situations that led to this poverty and distress, and a plea to the disenfranchised to stand up for their rights, their rights as human beings.

Käthe Kollwitz was a graphic artist and illustrator. Her best-known print is Tanz um die Carmagnole [Dance around the Carmagnole].2 Just as famous is her etching series Ein Weberaufstand (1897–1898, pp. 87–93), 3 inspired by a play written by Gerhart Hauptmann before he succumbed to portly and decadent opportunism. A hundred years ago the poverty of the Silesian weavers and their starvation wages drove them to desperation, strikes, and finally to open rebellion—violently repressed rebellion—and she depicted this poverty in scenes that are social counterparts to the works of Callot or to Goya’s Disasters of War. Zola’s great epic novel about the life of the miners, Germinal, inspired her to commence another series.4 Above all, however, she depicted with compassion and empathy the life of proletarian women and mothers, their woes and their hardships, their day-to-day struggle for their own existences and for the miserable existences of their poverty-stricken, sick, underfed children.

She lost two sons in the First World War. As a sculptress she had sometimes created sculptures in a spirit of monumentality, shaping in memory of these fallen sons the monument, the memorial, of a mother, a memorial raised for all mothers and for all women grieving for their fallen sons or husbands. 5 The workers admired and loved her work. They instinctively grasped that it was their lives that she was validating and defending.

The Nazis, who made such a big noise about culture and art but in reality tolerated only the glorification of their barbaric, bloodthirsty regime, were fond of saying that art should be “close to the people.” Now, if there was an oeuvre during this period that in the truest and most genuine sense was close to the people, to their lives and their suffering, to the woes and the hopes of the broad mass of the people—as the work of Zille had been—then it was the work of Käthe Kollwitz. But in the eyes of the master race of the Third Reich, the worker longing for social justice and human rights was simply a “subhuman” to be brought to heel by the controlling power using all the means at their disposal.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the Nazis repressed Kollwitz’s art; that art, I repeat, which was so close to the people. She was forbidden from exhibiting, and reproductions of her works could not be published in Hitler’s Germany. The first thing that the Nazis did when they came to power was to have Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Mann ejected from the Berliner Akademie der Künste [Berlin Academy of Arts]. Not one of the high-ranking gentlemen academicians, for fear of losing their titles, their positions, and the patronage of their new masters, had raised any objection. Well, except for one, the former head of Berlin city planning Martin Wagner, who declared himself in solidarity with Kollwitz and Mann and turned his back on an Academy that had done so little to defend artistic and human freedom.

In 1937 the workers of Berlin refused to let the Nazis’ exhibition ban deprive them of the celebration of Käthe Kollwitz’s seventieth birthday. Kollwitz’s friends had hung her prints in her studio, tacked to the wall in a makeshift way using drawing pins. Then the Berlin workers arrived in throngs and filed silently through the studio.

Käthe Kollwitz’s creative power was as strong as her principles. Despite the efforts of the Wotan worshippers—who had also tried to dismiss Rembrandt as a “ghetto painter”—to muzzle Kollwitz, her work and the significance of her work will never cease to exist so long as there are individuals and peoples who refuse to relinquish the spirit of freedom and social justice.

* Paul Westheim, “Käthe Kollwitz: Zum Tode der großen deutschen Graphikerin,” in Kunstkritik aus dem Exil (Hanau: Verlag Müller & Kiepenheuer, 1985), 253–55. Originally published in Demokratische Post / El correo democrático / The Democratic Post (Mexico City), 5, no. 7 (1945): 4.

1. German graphic artist and sculptress, born 8th July 1867 in Königsberg, died 22nd April 1945 in Moritzburg near Dresden. Since 1919 member of the Preußischen Akademie der Künste (Prussian Arts Academy), from which she was forced to resign in 1933, banned from exhibiting her work in 1936, continued to work in her studio house at Klosterstraße 75, 1943 moved to Nordhausen and in 1944 to Moritzburg.

2. The etching “Carmagnole” by Käthe Kollwitz, 1901.

3. Ein Weberaufstand (A Weavers’ Revolt) by Käthe Kollwitz, three lithographs and three etchings, realized from 1893 to 1897.

4. Series conceived by Käthe Kollwitz ca. 1893 but discontinued after the first etching.

5. “Die Eltern” (The parents), erected in 1932 in the war cemetery of Roggevelde (today, VladslooPraetbosch [Vladslo Praatbos]), Belgium.

Selbstbildnis am Tisch [Self-portrait at the table]

1893

Käthe Kollwitz

Ein Weberaufstand [A Weavers’ Revolt]

1897–1898

Aquatint, drypoint, and lithograph

Berlin, Alexander von der Becke, Verlag des graphischen Werkes

6 prints